October 1928
T h e
K i n g ' s
B u s i n e s s
582
NO— THE FEM IN IST MOVEM ENT HASN ’ T REACHED THE B AT AK S YET !
While mother and sister are away in the fields, planting, or plowing, or harvesting, t h e Batak menfolk, including most of the boys o f the tribe, strut around the village, enjoying the ease that is their birthright. O f course, if an enemy threat ens the village they are ex pected to, and they do, fight in its defense, but the women do no less on such occasions, and they perform all the man ual tasks o f the village when no danger threatens it.
The process o f threshing is a dual one. First the women folk stamp over the harvested rice, with their bare feet, to separate the grain from the sheaf. o f Farm L ife on the Toba Plateau, Interior o f Sumatra
Here You’ll Get an Idea
Herbert Photos
thyroid, and pituitary glands helps to create the criminal mind. Some glandular deficiencies may be inherited and thus, some have criminal impulses for which they are not responsible. If the outlet for these secretions becomes narrowed or closed, the. result^‘ ‘may deaden the sense of justice or the impulse for good, while the brain may at the same time indicate unusual intellectuality.” If this theory is carried out, the day may come when the proper thing to do when the judge asks whether you are guilty or not will be to. show him a telegram from the family physician declaring that your pituitary gland hasn’t been working for years. However these gentlemen may account for the cause of crime, the fact remains that thousands o f the worst criminals have been made new creatures in Christ, and left the old life immediately and forever. The Word o f -God clearly tells us both the cause and cure for crime. Men who art jalienated and at enmity with God in their minds (Col. 1 :21) are certain to produce “ wicked works.” What ever the birth, culture or circumstances o f men, if they are estranged from God in their rational powers, in con flict with the divine will, this state o f mind is going to express- itself sooner or later. God has one cure for this condition— only one. Men who have experienced, the new birth do not give them selves to wicked works. They are “ transformed by the renewing o f their minds” ( Rom. 12:2). Christianity is the only effective crime deterrent above the horizon. Why look for any other? Does it work? In New York City, o f all the multitude arrested for crime of anysort in the last twenty-five years, less than five per cent have ever been in Sunday school or had any religious instruction whatever; o f the negro arrests for crime, less than one per cent have been con nected with the church. This means that 95 per cent of the negro criminals are recruited from outside of the church. In a survey o f two of the great state prisons in America, it was found that of 974 prisoners in the prison, only one had studied the Bible. In the other prison, where there were 1,750 inmates, only six had studied the Bible.
“ evangelical” * because he makes use o f orthodox terms when everyone knows he gives an interpretation to the words which will not bear the light o f Scripture? There are Modernists of the earnest type o f Dr. Mathews and Dr. Fosdick who are making quite too easy the task of contrasting their own and their opponents’ views. What do they mean by “ accepting Jesus Christ as the revelation o f a Saviour God” ? Do they mean that He was “ God-like” or that He was “ the express image o f the invisible God” ? Do they mean that He died to teach men how to love God and how to die, or that He “ came to give His life a ransom fo r sinners?” ■ It is apparently the devil’s strategy to get the issues so confused that the ordinary layman will be unable to tell where the dividing line falls. It is high time for both Evangelicals and Modernists to clearly define the issues, to resolve to be fair and square, and to stop playing fast and loose with one another’s vocabularies. The Only Crime Deterrent Z ION ’S Herald, reporting an address by Dr. William J. Hickson, delivered at the Race Betterment Con ference, quotes him as having said that as a result of examining 40,000 criminals over a period o f twelve years, he has arrived at the conclusion that criminals cannot be reformed. They are constitutionally defective. Struthers Bert, writing in The Saturday Evening Post, reasons that crime has always been with us and that the cure for it will soon be found when we are forced to take drastic steps. Mankind does not move until it has to, he declares, and it is only when conditions become impossible that they are changed. He tells how our engineers were forced to investigate the cause of yellow fever in building the Panama Canal. He reminds us of the plagues that swept Europe m the Middle Ages and were the mothers of sanitation and preventative medicine. In the same way, he thinks, when we are driven to it, we will raise up someone who will discover the cause and cure of crime. On top of this statement from Mr. Bert comes the announcement from the head of the New York Neurolog ical Institute that the action or inaction of the thyrus,
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